STREAMING
THE PERFECT COUPLE
Netflix
From two lines of F Scott Fitzgerald has grown an entire branch – literary and pulp – of American fiction. The first appears in the short story The Rich Boy (1926): “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”.
The second is from The Great Gatsby (1925): “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…”
Welcome, then, to the Winbury family and their apparently flawless life of opulence and grace on the New England island of Nantucket, in Susanne Bier’s hugely entertaining six-part adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel. In the clan’s gorgeous beach house, Benji (Billy Howle), middle son of Tag (Liev Schreiber) and Greer (Nicole Kidman), is preparing to marry Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson, excellent), a zoologist who is not drawn from the same social caste (“Miss Sacks is lovely! But she’s from eastern Pennsylvania”).
Gathered for the happy day are Benji’s brothers Tom (Jack Reynor) and Will (Sam Nivola), Tom’s pregnant wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), best man Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khattar), maid of honour Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy, who also appeared in The White Lotus) and sensationally jaded family friend, Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani).
When a body washes up on the beach after a long night of partying, local police chief Dan Carter (Michael Beach) and Detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) begin their interrogations, with many twists and turns. As each character reveals a little more of the truth, the majestic facade of the Winburys crumbles before our eyes.
Anchoring the series is Kidman as the all-seeing matriarch and author of 28 bestsellers (one of the highlights is the unlikely degradation of her book launch into a Rick Astley singalong). In Big Little Lies (2017-), The Undoing (2020), Nine Perfect Strangers (2021) and Expats (2024), the actor’s presence in a series has become a kitemark of quality television – and she has never been more glacially menacing than as Greer, standing atop a mountain of cascading snobbery, defending the world she has built with little help from her wayward husband. When one of the characters demands an NDA from another, he says: “This is how we do things. This is how we’ve always done things”.
The Perfect Couple is great fun. It is also yet another instance of the flourishing plutophobic subgenre (see, for instance, Zoe Kravitz’s Blink Twice). The Winburys and their set are indeed “careless people”. No accident, then, that the credits scene is a Bollywood-style dance by the entire cast to Meghan Trainor’s Criminals.
BOOK
PRECIPICE, by Robert Harris
Hutchinson Heinemann
It stretches credulity that, on the eve of the Great War, as Ireland edged towards revolution, the 61-year-old Liberal prime minister HH Asquith was romantically involved with the 26-year-old Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord and Lady Sheffield, to whom he often wrote impassioned letters three times a day. Yet it is absolutely true.
In his magnificent 16th novel, Robert Harris – using Asquith’s private correspondence – recounts this extraordinary tale; adding a layer of fiction with Venetia’s side of the story (her letters to Asquith were destroyed) and the character of DS Paul Deemer, who is called in to investigate what appears to be a serious breach of cabinet security.
As ever in Harris’s fiction, there is tremendous energy in the entanglement of the dauntingly historical and the profoundly personal. This is the border terrain he inhabits and of which he is the master: so, alongside Venetia and her “Darling Prime”, we have David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Rupert Brooke and Edward VII. Human foible, the force of ambition and the catastrophes of warfare all interact on the page. A remarkable accomplishment.
STREAMING
KAOS
Netflix
Who can resist the idea of Jeff Goldblum playing Zeus in a modern setting? One of the many ingenuities of Charlie Covell’s eight-part series is that the beloved actor plays the king of the gods against type. Yes, this being Goldblum, Zeus is eccentric and distracted in his palace on Mount Olympus, where he lives with Queen Hera (Janet McTeer) and wanders around in luxurious sports gear (“Hermes! Pick up the phone!”). But he is also vicious, vindictive and capricious.
Nobody knows this better than our narrator Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), former friend of Zeus, now chained to a rock, his liver daily pecked by an eagle. It is he who, bit by bit, explains why the god is so frightened by his personal prophecy: “A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and chaos reigns”.
Meanwhile, Eurydice, known as Riddy, is about to break up with Orpheus (Killian Scott), when she is killed in a road accident. Befriending the god Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), Orpheus finds a way of descending to the underworld – wonderfully rendered in grey-washed monochrome and overseen by Hades (David Thewlis in great form).
Back on Crete, Ariadne (Leila Farzad), whose father is president, starts to question the divinely mandated order and, in particular, the harsh treatment of the surviving Trojans. Her bodyguard, Theseus, is also emotionally invested in this cause.
The premise of Kaos is ostensibly surreal, but the notion of a universe governed by the whims and petty jealousies of multiple gods quickly becomes all too plausible. No superhero movie or dragon-centred fantasy you watch this year will involve such magnificent world creation. Roll on season two.
CINEMA
SING SING
Selected cinemas
Colman Domingo, who rightly received an Oscar nomination for Rustin (2023), is one of the very best actors at work today and there was a risk that he would dominate this deft and delicate prison drama at the expense of the other characters. But he is too sophisticated a performer for that.
Based on the true story of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) programme, which originated at Sing Sing maximum-security facility in New York State, Greg Kwedar’s fine movie explores the work of a theatrical project designed to help inmates learn new skills and open up emotionally.
Domingo plays John Whitfield, aka Divine G, the creative force behind the scheme, and Paul Raci is the group’s director, Brent Buell. But almost every other role is played by real-life alumni of RTA; most remarkably in the case of Clarence Maclin, aka Divine Eye, who plays himself with a captivating combination of ferocity and subtlety.
Sing Sing could have been a tepid, feel-good exercise, done by the numbers. But Kwedar does not allow an atom of schmaltz on his set or disguise the often terrifying antagonisms of prison life. Highly recommended.
